The Impostor

When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning – a shadowy figure from his childhood – and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently – and perhaps forever.

Damon Galgut’s magnificent new novel evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. It is his most powerful and unforgettable novel yet.

"Fast paced and breathless... In one sense, The Impostor is the story of an innocent man who gets sucked into a world that he doesn't understand. In another, it is a critique of contemporary South Africa, a country that, as Galgut depicts it, is beset with cruelty and a spirit of brutish materialism. But there is a third level on which the novel works, that of the fable or parable."(William Skidelsky, Observer)